Mickey has immaculate white gloves. This story has a few documents I would prefer to handle wearing them.
On 18 September, Character.AI announced its “next chapter”. Its chief executive was moving to Disney, with members of the technical team expected to follow. Users received a thank-you and confirmation that the app was still running.
On 12 October, the next chapter arrived.
Chapter 11. Bankruptcy. [1][2]
A rare instance of corporate storytelling getting the numbering exactly right.
If you missed the introduction, Character.AI lets people talk to artificial characters. Invent stories. Flirt. Argue. Play a part. You can arrive looking for entertainment and stay because the conversation is more pleasant than the day that preceded it.
Now the company is in trouble, and Disney has an agreement involving $20 million for a licence to certain intellectual property and certain legal claims. It includes transition support; the transaction is subject to the court process and better offers. [3]
Twenty million dollars.
You do rather want to ask: Mickey, what exactly have you found in there?
Because people can leave something considerably more interesting than an email address in a service like this.
The chance to be ridiculous. Needy. Jealous. Exceptionally brave after midnight. To test a sentence they would never send to a real person. To ask for attention, having first disguised the request as a joke.
There are your nudes.
The kind you can produce without taking off your jumper.
Of course, not every conversation is a confession. Sometimes somebody just wants to defeat a dragon, and it would be rude to diagnose their relationship with their mother.
But when some users bring their fears, desires and ways of seeking affection into a chat, the potential value of that material goes beyond “people enjoy messaging”.
Which replies keep a conversation going? Which ones bring somebody back? What will a person tell an attentive listener?
Businesses commission research, interviews and focus groups to understand behaviour like this.
Here, a person may simply open an app and start talking.
Sometimes on a paid subscription.
Character.AI explicitly lists user text and interaction data among the sources used to develop its models. That does not mean every message entered a training dataset. But users contributing to the technology is not a literary invention. It is in the company's documentation. [4]
How lovely. We thought we were having a conversation. We were potentially contributing to development as well.
This is where I would quite like to write: “And that is what Disney came for.”
This is also where I have to stop my hand.
At the 14 October hearing, Character.AI's representative said Disney was not interested in the user data that concerned the states. At that point, there was no offer for the data or the operating chatbot business. [5]
So no, I do not have a document in which Mickey orders your late-night confessions.
I have a more interesting question: what built around those conversations might outlive the conversations themselves?
People can move to another company. Technology can be licensed. The app needs a buyer willing to keep it running. Character.AI says the platform will be wound down if no suitable proposal emerges. [2]
Suddenly, the thing we called one product has several different futures.
The user has grown accustomed to a conversational companion. The buyer is selecting assets.
Perfectly ordinary in a transaction. Slightly more surprising at three in the morning.
And then comes a comforting thought: fine, I will delete the conversation.
Deleting it can matter. But removing stored messages and removing their possible influence on an already-trained model are different technical jobs.
No, AI is not condemned to remember everything forever. Retraining and machine-unlearning methods exist. Reliably removing a particular influence and checking the result can be difficult. A button that deletes chat history does not, by itself, establish that this has happened. [6]
In Character.AI's instructions for users in the EEA and the UK, the promise is precise: after opting out, new content will not be used to train its generative models.
New.
That sentence does not provide earlier conversations with a time machine. [7]
Still, I am not going to cast every user as a victim and every buyer as a collector of other people's secrets.
People can enjoy these services. Selling technology can preserve jobs and give a company time. Bankruptcy alone does not establish misconduct.
But how much more tenderly the industry speaks to us when it needs our participation than when we need an explanation.
First, we are a community. Creators. The people who made it all possible.
Then we are invited to familiarise ourselves with the next steps.
So the question about nudes remains. Its answer belongs in the scope of the deal, the conditions governing data use and the court's decisions. White gloves prove very little.
How much would Mickey Mouse pay? For the specified technology deal, the announced figure is $20 million. That does not establish a purchase of personal conversations.
And what is the value of everything people said while they felt heard?
I would like to see that price separately.
Preferably before I am invited to bare my soul again to improve the service.